


The wolf underneath your skin

by Etalice



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Did I Mention Angst?, M/M, POV Second Person, There is quite a lot of it., an overabundance of metaphors, no really, poetic prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 22:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20366143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Etalice/pseuds/Etalice
Summary: You want to punch him. You want to hear the sound of his teeth on the stone-hard floor. You want to smear your knuckles in blood, you want to scream your betrayal in iron-red paint across his face. You want pain and spit and bruises that bloom like watercolour peonies under the skin.A scene ofWhat's past is prologue, from another perspective.





	The wolf underneath your skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kristinabird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kristinabird/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What's Past is Prologue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20063455) by [Kristinabird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kristinabird/pseuds/Kristinabird). 

> To the wonderful Kristina, who screamed at me about Snupin on Discord, and welcomed me in her canoe with open arms, who gave me fics to read, and wrote some too. Fandom is all the more enjoyable for your presence in it.
> 
> To the amazing [Andithiel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Andithiel/pseuds/Andithiel) who was not consulted before being volunteered to beta this fic but stepped up to the challenge all the same, corrected all my late-night typoes and gifted me the kindest words. I appreciate your input and generosity more than I can express.

When Dumbledore asks you to come teach at Hogwarts, it punches the air straight out of your lungs. _He’s there, isn’t he?_ You want to ask. _Does he still have silk-dark hair?_ _Does he still have tar-black eyes? Does he still have soap-soft skin? _(_Will he set me on fire and burn me to the ground?) _You’re not going to accept, of course. You’ve hurt him quite enough for a lifetime, hurt yourself in the process too, and you’re entirely certain that if you ever set eyes on the man again, your bones would turn to dust, there, right there, underneath your skin.

You come teach at Hogwarts. You see him again at the welcoming feast. He still has silk-dark hair and tar-black eyes. You were hoping you wouldn’t recognise him, you realise, you were hoping you could forget the smell of his skin and the softness of his mouth and the way there were always worry-lines at the corners of his eyes. Your bones turn to dust, your blood fills with lightning, your lungs drown in the saltwater of want and regret. (He sets you on fire, he burns you to the ground.) You want him to never look at you. You want him not to recognise you, not to remember the way he used to bite your shoulder or the way he used to say your name like the word was a smooth amber bead sitting on his tongue or the time he spilt pumpkin juice on your jumper and you never got the stain out. (You still have the jumper. It sits, love-worn and too small, at the bottom of your underwear drawer. You never take it out, but some nights, its existence helps you breathe.) He does not look at you. You want him to look at you. You want him to remember that you breathed his name onto the skin of his back, etched it onto your bones, right there in the forest. You want him to have a scar shaped like you on his chest, on his heart, you want to be the grain of sand that hurt and chafed and turned into a beautiful pearl. You want him not to have forgotten you. But still, he does not look at you. The tendons of his neck, the flint of his eyes turn steadily away from you, and when you close the door of your private chambers behind you, your tongue is a stone and your heart a pincushion.

He makes you Wolfsbane. He still does not talk to you. He still does not look at you. He still pretends he doesn’t see you when you sit down next to him at dinner, and he still turns around if you walk towards him on the grounds, but he makes you Wolfsbane, and you hang onto that fact to keep you from drowning. Because here’s the thing: he’s still gorgeous and sharp. He’s still everything he was years ago, he’s still everything you fell in love with back when it was the two of you hidden away in libraries and forest groves, and he’s still everything you carry inside your beehive heart, warm and sweet like honey, hot and swollen like a sting. You miss him like a lost limb or a broken tooth.

You’re never going to act on it.

You’re never going to act on it because you’re a wolf, you’re a wolf, you’re a wolf, and the potion was never going to change that. You’re never going to act on it because he ran away, he ran away, he ran away. You’re never going to act on it because your lungs fill with pumice at the thought of that day, and you struggle to swallow the sorrow of it down your sandpaper-rough throat. (_ Eat it all up. Devour it whole. You are a wolf. You are a wolf. _)

You go to his workroom. For the potion, of course. You have to. And if you are a good ten minutes early? And if your heart has been buzzing and humming at the thought of his name on your lips, of his fingers brushing yours, of his eyes on your skin? You don’t notice it. He’s bent over a workbench when you enter. (You know every bone in his spine, you counted them, once, you ran soft fingers over them, strewed wet-warm kisses over the ridges.) He doesn’t turn around to look at you. He’s wearing some sort of earmuffs, you realise, he hasn’t heard you come in. 

You extend your arm, hand hovering in the air.

_ I touched you once. My fingers roamed the untamed lands of your skin. I learned the geography of your body and committed it all to memory like the cartographers of old. I know all the places that make you suck in a breath, I know all the places that make your eyelids flutter and your lip disappear under want-sharp teeth. I remember them all still. _

_ You loved me once. You loved me. _

_ Before you ran. _

You want to draw him flush against your body. You want to make him remember he loved you. Bite his shoulder and pull at his hair. Kiss his eyelids and whisper his name like a prayer.

You want to punch him. You want to hear the sound of his teeth on the stone-hard floor. You want to smear your knuckles in blood, you want to scream your betrayal in iron-red paint across his face. You want pain and spit and bruises that bloom like watercolour peonies under the skin.

You tap him on the shoulder instead.

He turns around. He’s fast and sharp and he almost knocks you over. There’s an elbow in your ribs, a bony shoulder against your jaw. You feel your skin light up in pain fireworks as you come in contact with the panicked motion that is Severus, and then, he still has the gall to look surprised. 

Surprised that you came in for your potion, surprised that his limbs came into sharp-shock contact with all the soft parts of your body.

You can’t help but laugh.

And then: his eyes are on you, bright and earnest. He’s seeing you now. He’s taking in everything you became while you were busy closing the Severus-shaped hole in your chest, he’s learning the path of the scar along your jaw and the patterns of the lines around your eyes. _ You’ve looked at me like this once when there were no scars upon my skin, no marking-gauge lines upon my face. Do you still like this skin? This face? You liked it well enough to kiss me, once. Could you like it enough to forget about the monster under my skin once again? _

Severus keeps looking at you, as one would look at a sacred statue or an ancient artefact, with reverence and awe. Longing, too.

You forget how to breathe.

You forget how to think. You forget how to talk.

You forget that there is a wolf beneath your skin. You forget he ran away.

All you remember then is how to see, and you see him. You see the boy he used to be, and you see the man he’s become. You see the hesitation, the hurt, the want. You see every emotion at once in the trembling corners of his lips, you see every soft kiss you shared, every touch of the hands, every time he whispered _Remus_ like a binding-spell into your too-long hair and your wool-worn jumpers. This body held you, you realise. Under the sediment of time, under the calcium-deposit-armour of the years, this body held you.

_ Would you still? _ You want to ask. _ Would you still hold me? Is there still the shape of my face in the crook of your neck? The shape of my hands on the small of your back? Is there a scar somewhere on your skin that spells my name? Is there still a part of you that holds a memory of me at all? _

“Severus, are you still in there?” you ask instead, and it is your way of asking all of these questions at once. It is your way of asking all the other questions too, the ones you left unvoiced, the ones that go _ Would you still fit in the circle of my arms? _ and _ Could I still love you? _The ones that you keep pushing back into the well of your chest every time they overflow. 

Severus’ face splits in two at the question, hopeful like the parting of the sea and broken like Mount St Helen crumbling open. Time turns back. Sediment falls away. Every blood cell in your veins is bright and luminous and all-consuming. You are a star collapsing upon itself. You see him now. _ You’re still here, _ your mind supplies, half-mad with elation and desire. _ I haven’t lost you, not entirely, not when there are still the same bones that held me underneath your skin, not when you still look at me like that. Oh, I haven’t lost you. _ And then, all at once and unbidden, all the floodgates in your chest open. _ I love you. (Oh, I love you. I love you. I’ve loved you for years. Since always perhaps.) _

“You are…” you hear your voice say, broken-rough and shaky in the hallowed silence of the room.

Severus’ eyes escape you, but you’ve let him run once already and you can’t let him do it again, not now. Not when he’s finally here, not when he might want you still. Not when you love him brighter than the moon. You raise your hand, softly, and cup his cheek, bringing him back to you. The warmth of his skin sends sparks flying onto your dry-straw heart. You know it’ll consume you entirely if you let it. Fat, wet tears roll down Severus’ cheeks. You do not remove your hand. (Neither of you moves at all, as you remember how to be broken boys, sharing unspoken secrets behind the doors of empty classrooms.)

“God, I… I missed you.” 

Severus’ voice is pain-rough and truth-damp. Your dry-straw heart catches fire in earnest and the flames lick at your limbs until you turn entirely into a forest fire, passionate and desperate all at once. And you love him, oh you love him, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter that there is a wolf underneath your skin, and it doesn’t matter that he ran away, because he’s talking to you in his pumice-pain voice. Because there is a scar shaped like you somewhere, a missing limb that bears your name, a hole in his chest that he’s filled with your memory. Because you’ve missed him like a drowning man misses air.

Severus is standing close, vulnerable and soft under the palm of your hand. Your heart stops.

_ I love you. I want this. Did you miss me as much as I missed you? Is there a hole shaped like me in your chest? Will you let me fill it? _

You move slowly. Closer. The smoke in your lungs is choking you, the fire in your veins is consuming you and Severus’ eyes are well-deep and ocean-dark. You could drown in them given half a chance.

_ Do you love me? Do you want this? Let me fill this space between us. Let me find answers. Let me burn and drown in the essence of you. I will fill the holes in your chest, I will rub balm onto your old scars. Let me find you again. _

You kiss him.

(He kisses you back.) 

The motion of his lips against you is entirely too much for you, entirely too strong, too warm, too bright. You lose control of your limbs and muscles, you let them stretch towards him, curl around him like twine or bindweeds. You let the wildfire in your chest and in your limbs spread over him too, fisting your hands in his coal-dark hair as he moans into your mouth and pulls you close, close, closer still, close as your bodies will let you be. 

_ It’s him, _ your mind sings as your fingers dig bruises into the back of his neck. _ It’s always been him, ever since I was fourteen and didn’t even know I liked boys. It’s always been him and I didn’t lose him. He’s seen the wolf take over my body and still, he lets me kiss him and hold him. It’s him. It’s him. It’s him. _

Severus’ hands are in your hair, and on your jaw, and under your jumper. You push him flush against the wall, pressing your body against his in an attempt to bring him closer, to melt into him entirely, because you love him, oh, you love him, and it’ll never be enough. He moans. The sound of it sets fire to the mercury thiocyanate in your bones and you feel them turning into Pharaoh’s snakes beneath your flesh as you deepen the kiss. You want this, and you want him, and you’re half insane with desire, opening your mouth against him to tell him everything he means to you, to tell him you’ve loved him for years, to tell him—

“NO!”

He pushes you away.

At first, you feel the cold, the sudden loss tearing through you like a scalpel. Then comes the shame.

_ You’re a wolf, _ says a chalk-on-blackboard voice at the bottom of your chest, _ Mad with always-hunger, with the bottomless hole in your chest. Eating him all up. Devouring him whole. You’re a wolf. You’re a wolf. Savage and dangerous. Greedy and insatiable. You would have eaten him alive, every last part of him, and still hungered for more. _

“Severus, I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t mean…”

Words fail you. You want to turn back time. You want to take back every single feeling that spilt out, pick them up from the floor and stuff them back into your chest. Pretend he’s never seen them. (Pretend you wouldn’t have devoured him whole had he let you.)

“Stop,” Severus says before you have time to trip over yourself any further, “It’s ok, I just… I suppose we need to talk about this.”

“I’d say so, yeah.” You hear yourself chuckling. You’re half certain it is the sound of your bones rattling the empty cage of your chest. You do not want to talk about this. You do not want to hear about the wolf beneath your skin, about the danger of your body, about the need for others to protect themselves and how you_ must understand love, it’s not against you, but you must understand that we need distance_. Those words cut too deep, and you’re not entirely certain you would survive it. Not now that your blood’s turned to ash, and that your heart’s burned away, and that your paper-brittle skin is all that is left of you.

“I just need time to… process. I want to…” Severus’ words get caught in his throat. It doesn’t matter. You’re doing your best not to hear them. “I need to think. Your potion is on my desk. Can we speak tomorrow when you come for your final dose?”

You nod, not because you agree, but because you hope it’ll block out the noise of Severus’ words. You’ve always found it easier to ignore the things you didn’t hear or didn’t understand. You take the potion and close the door behind you. You spend the rest of the day trying to forget the concept of tomorrow, to forget Severus’ tar-black eyes and the warmth of his skin, to forget you almost ate him whole.

(You fail.)

In the middle of your chest, there is a gaping hole shaped like _ It’s him _and _ I love you _and _ I didn’t lose him. _

You tell yourself it doesn’t matter because you’ve been living with holes shaped like _mum and dad _and _a normal life _underneath your ribs your entire life. 

You tell yourself you won’t notice one more. 

You tell yourself it’s for the best.

You do not stop lying to yourself.


End file.
